GLENN BROWN (B. 1966)The Music of the Mountains 2016 signed on a label affixed to the reverse of the backing boardIndia ink and acrylic on panel 135 by 95 cm. 53 1/8 by 37 3/8 in. This work was executed in 2016. Footnotes:This work is registered in the archives of the Glenn Brown Studio, London. ProvenanceGagosian Gallery, London Acquired directly from the above by the present ownerExhibitedFlorence, Museo Stefano Bardini, Glenn Brown: Piaceri Sconosciuti, 2017London, Gagosian Gallery, Glenn Brown: Come to Dust, 2018Guernsey, The Rona Cole Art Gallery, Guernsey Museum at Candie, 2018 - 2022, work on loan to the museumEmerging from a shimmering veil of woven, fluttering lines and threads of acrylic and ink, the timeless subject of Glenn Brown's The Music of the Mountains impresses upon us the uniqueness of his talent and the thrilling nature of his daring artistry that calls upon the benevolent gods of art history, from Da Vinci, Fragonard, Rembrandt and Boucher to John Martin, Dali, and Frank Auerbach. These apparitions don't simply appear as facsimile, however, but instead deconstruct the very humanity that comprises their historicity. Brown produces an intensified vision of painting qua painting that is captivating to behold and supremely contemporary in their notions of authorship and subject. Since his emergence in the 1990s, he has been a maverick of contemporary practice who has gone against the grain consistently, earning a Turner Prize nomination in 2000 and carving out a place amongst the most significant and lauded painters of his generation, with works in major institutions including The Art Institute of Chicago; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. He will further solidify his standing as one of the leading contemporary British artists with a museum dedicated to his practice and works from his personal collection, including Dutch and Italian masters, opening in Marylebone during the 2022 October Frieze week.In The Music of the Mountains, one cannot escape the elegance of Brown's virtuoso hand that lures and enthrals our gaze with its fluidity, poetry and sensitivity to form. Above all else, Brown is an artist who produces beautiful paintings. But therein lies the complexity and tragedy of his practice that makes his work some of the most challenging conceptual feats of contemporary art. Christoph Grunenberg, Director of the Kunsthalle Bremen, seized upon this essential quality, describing his art as 'one of extreme attraction – in subject matter, execution and look – yet at its heart there is darkness, a melancholic vision of death, destruction and loneliness. Belying their aesthetic perfection, masterly technical dexterity and formal integrity, Brown's paintings reveal surprising contradictions and ambiguities' (Christoph Grunenberg in Glenn Brown, London: 2009, p. 15). In this way, through The Music of the Mountains we are given access to a transcendent vision of art history that reveals fresh narratives and upends contemporary questions by placing them on a timeline that shrinks their fleeting pertinence. Here, Brown's wisps of paint and ink call upon the delicate and unsurpassed sketches of Da Vinci, blending and folding about one another to manifest a ghost-like head of a woman caught in a three-quarter glance, her eyes cast down appearing transfixed and intent. It is an arresting vision whose features evoke the playful fullness of a Boucher, yet her apparent seriousness lends an air of Judith beheading Holofernes. These epistemic questions tug at our knowledge of art history and the history of images themselves, proving an elaborate contemporary challenge to the validity of painting today. Brown thus goes beyond the reproduction of an original image; he reconstructs the composition, subjects it to distortion, and ultimately imbues it with a new sense of narrative. In his skilful handling of paint and conceptual ingenuity grounded in Postmodern critical theory, The Music of the Mountains draws us in with a timeless beauty that teeters on collapse, as exquisite and gossamer as the painted surface is. In opening his practice to the questions and tribulations of originality, Brown places himself amongst a rarefied group of artists for whom appropriation practices have defined their careers, from Marcel Duchamp, Cindy Sherman, Sherry Levine, Richard Prince, and Jeff Koons. Brown stands apart, however. His paintings leave doors open to ambiguity and revivification, not least in his titles that can appear oftentimes as banal or overly romantic, but interestingly turn to music as a source of inspiration. 'The connections between my paintings and my titles are not always obvious but they are never random,' the artist says: 'I am trying to puzzle viewers. The work is supposed to stick in their heads and make them ask why. Again, that is the base with good music; something, perhaps a sense of disharmony or miss alignment of timing, catches your attention but you often cannot articulate why. I think it is the same with a painting: it has to catch you by being enigmatic and intriguing – whether it is through colour or meaning, beauty or ugliness, a celebration of life or the devastation of death' (the artist interviewed by Rochelle Steiner in Glenn Brown, London: 2004, p. 100).In a perfectly balanced synthesis, Brown's execution is bonded to the grandeur of his ideas, which enables him to operate with an unparalleled nuance, cutting right between what the image is and what it represents. Without the masterly hand of the artist, such notions of beauty and decay, of life and death, would not uphold. As evidenced in the present work, these sumptuous swirls and painterly panache permit us to glimpse the sublime. But Brown allows darkness to creep in, where trailing threads and spirals appear to create a kind of smog, a putridity that hangs in the air of the piece. Ultimately, what the artist captures is pure affect – the remnant of an impression that casts itself back through time: 'the naked flesh of the original model may be long dead, but that just aids the imagination Fragonard, Auerbach and Rembrandt painted the living. Their flesh has become paint so I paint paint. The paint is the crusty residue left after the relationship between the artist and his model is over. It is all that there is left of real love, so I paint that' (the artist in Ibid., p. 17).Glenn Brown's The Music of the Mountains is an exemplary painting that illustrates the richness and vastness of his practice. In Brown's dextrous hand, we sense the timelessness of his subject that is conjured spirit-like before us. She hangs in the air as a vision of art that was, and art as it is now – constantly evolving, emerging, dwindling, and reconstituting. Brown continues to be one of the most exciting and talented contemporary artists, whose communion with art history's masters has surely placed him amongst them.This lot is subject to the following lot symbols: * AR* VAT on imported items at a preferential rate of 5% on Hammer Price and the prevailing rate on Buyer's Premium.AR Goods subject to Artists Resale Right Additional Premium.For further information on this lot please visit Bonhams.com
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